1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a color adjustment apparatus, a print control apparatus, a color adjustment method, and a color adjustment program product, which are intended to create data expressing adjusted images to be printed by a printing apparatus, with the input image color-adjusted.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There has been known a printing technology which involves color adjustment for input images by the printing (with a printer) of colors to be adjusted. (See, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2002-290753.) This technology achieves its object by causing the printer to print a predetermined typical color and, at the same time, generating more than one kind of information about its neighboring colors and causing them to be displayed on the screen. The neighboring colors are represented with adequately varied hue, chroma, and lightness. The color information selected by the user reflects the color profile. In this way the user can make approximate color adjustment without requiring complex processes in the case where the color on the monitor does not agree with the color of print output.
The above-mentioned technology, however, is not able to perform adequate color adjustment easily for any kind of images, because images include natural images and non-natural images, such as graphic images and computer graphic images, and natural images have a variety of color tones. In other words, it needs repeated printing on trial-and-error basis in order to accomplish adequate color adjustment for individual images. The procedure in this manner takes a long time.
There has been an apparatus which displays colors to be adjusted on the color monitor and allows the user to specify the adjusted colors, so that color-adjusted images are displayed on the monitor. (See, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-open Nos. H9-186907, H10-224647, and 2000-333032.) Being not designed to cause the printer to print colors to be adjusted, it cannot be applied to the process for achieving color adjustment of input images by printing.
There is known an apparatus which causes the printer to print several color-adjusted images and allows the user to select one image with adjusted colors. (See, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2002-223364.) The disadvantage of this apparatus is that printing several actual images according to image data takes a long time.
Sensory color adjustment by the tone curve editor or the slide bar for individual colors does not permit the user to adjust a desired color only but requires him to repeat printing for subtle color adjustment, which takes a very long time.